On 24 June, from 00:01 to 23:59, Copenhagen’s six contemporary art institutions are going to turn the city into a stage for performance art when Art in a Day kicks off with a programme buzzing with free art experiences.

Join us on an urban art tour through Copenhagen with performances of all kinds taking place in the contemporary art institutions and outside in the city’s spaces – in its streets and backyards, outside the department store Magasin du Nord, in the garden of Restaurant Noma, on bridges, in church towers and on the water.

The star-studded programme features international artists such as Peaches, VALIE EXPORT, Baby Dee, Martin Creed, Tosh Basco, Arvida Byström, and Monster Chetwynd as well as Danish Maja Malou Lyse and Esben Weile Kjær, Sophie Dupont, KasperSophie, Jules Fischer, Jacob Kirkegaard and Henrik Vibskov.

Everyone is welcome and participation is free – just as it’s free to visit the contemporary art institutions.
Follow the route from one contemporary art institution to the next or be surprised by the performances popping up all over the city around the clock.

Greater than anything we could have done on an individual basis

Art in a Day is created by Copenhagen’s six contemporary art institutions, which have joined forces to create this annual celebration of performance art. Art in a Day moves art into public space, giving everyone a chance to experience star performance artists and new talents during a 24-hour period packed with diverse, extraordinary, and interactive art experiences.

We look forward to seeing you!

Greater than anything we could have done on an individual basis

Art in a Day is created by Copenhagen’s six contemporary art institutions, which have joined forces to create this annual celebration of performance art. Art in a Day moves art into public space, giving everyone a chance to experience star performance artists and new talents during a 24-hour period packed with diverse, extraordinary, and interactive art experiences.

We look forward to seeing you!

Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Copenhagen Contemporary, Nikolaj Kunsthal, O – Overgaden, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, and Kunstforeningen GL STRAND.
The program is curated by Creator Projects in close collaboration with the contemporary art institution

Art in a Day kicks off already on 23 June with the Turner Prize winner Martin Creed’s performance All the Bells in front of GL STRAND in the inner city at 11:22: There the programme will be launched with a large sound work performed by churches in Copenhagen, primary school bells, children’s voices and the city’s own soundscape.
Just after midnight on 24 June, at 00:01, the 24-hour programme starts in earnest when the internationally renowned musician and visual artist Peaches gives a nocturnal music performance at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art.

In the morning and in the course of the day you can follow a band of musicians wearing costumes by the designer Henrik Vibskov marching through the streets of Copenhagen – mapping out the route from the performances of one contemporary art institution to the next. As you make your way through the streets and canals of Copenhagen, art performances will be popping up continuously until Art in a Day concludes at Copenhagen Contemporary on Refshaleøen – where Peaches will end this year’s 24-hour performance programme with an awesome after-party.

Please note that the opening times of the six contemporary art institutions are listed on their respective websites and may vary during these 24 hours

The programme kicks off on 23 June at 11.22
In front of Kunstforeningen GL STRAND

Martin Creed, All The Bells

Art in a Day proudly presents Turner Prize winner Martin Creed’s epic sound work, All the Bells. First presented in San Gimignano (work no. 245) in 2000 and later developed for the 2012 Olympic Games in London (work no. 1197) where thousands participated in the piece, ringing bells from Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament in London to Millennium Square in Bristol to St Albans Cathedral in Hertfordshire and in hundreds of other churches, schools, and homes throughout the United Kingdom. Hoping to create a similar joyful sound, school children and churches in central Copenhagen will ring their bells on 23 June at 11.22 to herald the start of Art in a Day at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND. All are welcome to participate. 

Opening speech at 11.00 by Mia Nyegaard, Mayor of Culture and Recreation

23 June from 23.00 to 23.59
Den Frie Udstillingsbygning

Jules Fischer, Vanitas

Flowers wither, fruit rot, and glass break. Nothing is forever. The title Vanitas refers to baroque still life paintings where the things around us are staged to symbolise both impermanence and vanity. The performance Vanitas will take you into a dark and dreamy world of queer bodies and symbols ruled by change. Here, you will meet the precariousness of finding intimacy and meaning in a landscape dictated by binaries.

Vanitas is performed by professional dancers, performers, and singers to a poetic sound collage of pop music. The performance is filled with ambivalence and everything is in a constant state of transformation.

This performance is a tribute to queer and trans communities everywhere and to those who must be in flux to be whole.

There are a limited number of places which will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis

24 June from 00.01 to 00.20
Den Frie Udstillingsbygning

Peaches

The internationally renowned musician initiates the programme for Art in a Day with a musical performance.

An iconic feminist musician, producer, director, and performance artist, Peaches has spent nearly two decades pushing boundaries and wielding immeasurable influence over mainstream pop culture from outside of its confines. Carving a bold, sexually progressive path in her own image, she has made history in the realm of both music and visual art.

For Art in a Day, she will stage two performances on 24 June: an explosive concert at Den Frie at 00.01 and an intense music performance at CC, Copenhagen Contemporary, in the evening. She has collaborated with everyone from Iggy Pop and Daft Punk to Kim Gordon and Major Lazer, had her music featured in cultural beacons like Lost In Translation, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Broad City among others.

Dubbed a ‘genuine heroine’ by the New York Times, Peaches has released five critically acclaimed studio albums blending electronic music, hip-hop, and punk rock while tackling gender politics, sexual identity, ageism, and the patriarchy. Uncut has raved that her work brought together ‘high art, low humour, and deluxe filth [in] a hugely seductive combination’, while Rolling Stone called her ‘surreally funny [and] nasty’.

An equally prolific visual artist, Peaches has directed over twenty of her own videos, designed one of the most raw and creative stage shows in popular music, and has appeared at modern art’s most prestigious gatherings, from Art Basel, Miami, to the Venice Biennale.

24 June from 00.01 to 23.59
The Grand Hall, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Kunsthal Charlottenborg)

VALIE EXPORT, Ping Pong – Ein Film Zum Spielen, Ein Spielfilm

Art in a Day proudly announces the collaboration with performance artist VALIE EXPORT for a 24-hour continuous performance, which can only be activated by the audience. The artist will stage Ping Pong, a continuous interactive performance staged in the form of an art installation. By inviting the audience to play with the ball and racquet to try to hit the dots that – like balls – appear on the screen, Export presents a film that, like an installation, can only be activated if the audience become a player of the game.

Stripped of semantics, the relationship between viewer and screen becomes one dictated by stimulus and reaction. Ping Pong questions the power relationship between producer, artist, and screen – and the audience as a consumer of the product. The viewer turns into a player only when interacting with the screen and the two become partners in a game, even if the controlling character implies that the viewer is subjected to the rules of the screen.

24 June from 09.00 to 10.00
Den Frie Udstillingsbygning to Kunsthal Charlottenborg

Henrik Vibskov, Parade

Vibskov creates a parade where music, art, and fashion meet people directly. The parade, composed by performers singing and dressed up in costumes tailored by Vibskov becomes a ‘healing walk’ where the past is echoed in the present and experienced as a future prophecy. By creating costumes defined by a graphic silhouette and a monochromatic palette, Vibskov brings into the streets of Copenhagen a marching group whose dress code recalls that of women in the nineteenth century when they used to carry fish to the harbour of Gl. Strand from northern Copenhagen.

The parade echoes these women’s journey and their ancestral connection to the sea, paying homage to these elements and to the matriarchal structures they foster. The parade invites the people of Copenhagen to tag along, observe, or simply enjoy the magic ghostly presence that the theatrical costumes and melodies create around them. The group of people move around the city towards the harbour, linking one performance to the next one, emphasising how distances in the city and the water could feel different when experienced at a different pace.

24 June from 10.00 to 20.00
Magasin, Kongens Nytorv, ground floor

KASPERSHOPHIE, Peuple

Peuple is an interactive art experience, a luxury clothing brand, and a functioning pop-up store. It is staged as a commercial booth at the entrance of Magasin, selling exclusive folkloric costumes in children’s sizes. Peuple is a performance that asks its audience to enter and experience a commercial space and pose questions on how culture emerges, its ownership, and how to pass it on. The visual clash between rural imagery and the department store’s contemporary consumer culture makes both visitors and buyers wonder whether traditions are for sale or whether they are put on display as objects of art and cultural heritage. Both playful and serious, the visually seductive work invites reflection on the emergence of national identity and culture. The work has sprung from the absence of national costumes in Danish national awareness and, as a central gesture, with equal celebration and critique, it offers a folkloric costume to fill the void.

24 June from 11.00 to 18.00
Kunsthal Charlottenborg, top foyer

Sophie Dupont, I Breathe You, Do You Breathe Me?

Sophie Dupont returns to Charlottenborg with a continuous performance called I Breathe You, Do You Breathe Me? through which she explores breathing as a means of being present in the world. Breathing is time-sensitive and changes according to the moods of bodies.

Dupont invites the audience to focus on breathing by asking them to pay attention to their breathing, creating a relationship between performers and visitors. As breathing constantly connects the inner and outer worlds, Dupont and her co-performers’ breathing becomes audible during the performance through speakers forming a bridge that connects the performers’ breathing to that of the audience. The performance concentrates on the bodies’ spontaneity, intuition, and imperfection, reflecting on human nature and spirituality. Dupont becomes a conductor and an instrument for breathing together with those present, turning the work into a collective dance through the temperaments of those who are present in the room.

24 June from 12.00
From Kunsthal Charlottenborg to Nikolaj Kunsthal and then on to Kunstforeningen GL STRAND

Henrik Vibskov, Parade

Vibskov creates a parade where music, art, and fashion meet people directly. The parade, composed by performers singing and dressed up in costumes tailored by Vibskov becomes a ‘healing walk’ where the past is echoed in the present and experienced as a future prophecy. By creating costumes defined by a graphic silhouette and a monochromatic palette, Vibskov brings into the streets of Copenhagen a marching group whose dress code recalls that of women in the nineteenth century when they used to carry fish to the harbour of Gl. Strand from northern Copenhagen.

The parade echoes these women’s journey and their ancestral connection to the sea, paying homage to these elements and to the matriarchal structures they foster. The parade invites the people of Copenhagen to tag along, observe, or simply enjoy the magic ghostly presence that the theatrical costumes and melodies create around them. The group of people move around the city towards the harbour, linking one performance to the next one, emphasising how distances in the city and the water could feel different when experienced at a different pace.

24 June from 13.00 to 18.00
O – Overgaden

Arvida Byström, A Cybernetic Doll’s House

Arvida Byström is a visual artist who works with performance, installation art, and photography to create immersive landscapes where she places the body at the centre of attention – her own and that of the public – to turn it into a site for negotiation of heteronormative notions of gender, body, and sexuality. With A Cybernetic Doll’s House, Byström develops a performance staging a conversation with an A. I. sex doll. The doll is a luxury model sex doll designed to learn and have a real conversation with its owner. In the performance, the artist is exploring digitally feminised objects, such as Apple’s Siri. Even though these are artificial objects, they still embody gender. How complex conversations are one able to have with these machine-learning protocols? A Cybernetic Doll’s House premieres at Art in a Day as part of a larger collection of works.

24 June from 14.00 to 14.15. VALIE EXPORT interacts with the audience
The Grand Hall, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Kunsthal Charlottenborg)

VALIE EXPORT, Ping Pong – Ein Film Zum Spielen, Ein Spielfilm

Art in a Day is proud to announce the collaboration with performance artist VALIE EXPORT for a 24-hour continuous performance, which can only be activated by the audience. The artist will stage Ping Pong, a continuous interactive performance staged in the form of an art installation. By inviting the audience to use the ball and racquet and try to hit the dots that – like balls – appear on the screen, Export presents a film that, like an installation, can only be activated if the audience join in the game.

Stripped of semantics, the relationship between viewer and screen becomes one dictated by stimulus and reaction. Ping Pong questions the power relationship between producer, artist, and screen – and the audience as a consumer of the product. The viewer turns into a player only when interacting with the screen and the two become partners in a game, even if the controlling character implies that the viewer is subjected to the rules of the screen.

(The interactive installation is open from 00.01 to 23.59)

24 June from 15.00 to 15.45
Nikolaj Kunsthal

Baby Dee, Where Oceans Know Us

A sui generis musician and artist, Baby Dee will present a unique concert conceptualised and performed for the very special organ at the Nikolaj Kunsthal. After having reconnected to her – long denied – (humdrum) past – as a church organist, Dee presents a newly scripted concert in Copenhagen where the majestic sound of the organ is mixed and combined with the electronic sounds of Mabe Fratti’s cello and Hector’s guitar. By creating a unique concert where the ‘phantom-of-the-operaesque gothic pomposity’ of the organ meets new melodies, Dee invites the audience to rethink the organ as a magic instrument. By converting the organ from an instrument that invites the audience to praise ‘good behaviour’ into a synthetic and totally mechanical instrument where each key she plays sounds like an explosion, Dee embraces the magic embodied in the space at Nikolaj Kunsthal after it has been converted from a former church into an art space.

24 June from 16.00 to 17.00
Boat trip starting and ending at Holmen’s Church

Jacob Kirkegaard, Riverbed

Jacob Kirkegaard’s artistic research is invested in exploring sound as a tool for investigating other means to experience the world beyond the human eye. For Art in a Day, Kirkegaard has developed Riverbed, a performance composed by a score that collects and remixes the underwater sounds recorded along Copenhagen’s canals and harbour. Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s book Water and Dreams, Riverbed becomes the city’s liquid subconsciousness, inviting the audience on a boat trip along the waterways of Copenhagen in a live performance where Jacob Kirkegaard dives into rarely heard and otherworldly spaces right beneath the bustling city. The audience will discover the cityscape differently by listening to its underwater sounds, experiencing those familiar environments through other senses.

Only available with pre-ordered tickets. Book a ticket here.

24 June from 17.30 to 18.00
Kunstforeningen GL STRAND

Martin Creed – Live in Copenhagen

Martin Creed, Turner prize-winning artist performer composer anti-war warm-hearted heart-warming head-scratching hair-combing talk songs cabaret feelings spoken-word love jokes tricks friendly loneliness experimental piano juggling clothes, including socks, ideas thoughts bums how to live spelling mistakes hard-hitting easy-going.

Watch Martin Creed perform in Singapore, 2019 here.

24 June from 18.00 to 18.45
Nikolaj Kunsthal

Baby Dee, Where Oceans Know Us

A sui generis musician and artist, Baby Dee will present a unique concert conceptualised and performed for the very special organ at the Nikolaj Kunsthal. After having reconnected to her – long denied – (humdrum) past – as a church organist, Dee presents a newly scripted concert in Copenhagen where the majestic sound of the organ is mixed and combined with the electronic sounds of Mabe Fratti’s cello and Hector’s guitar. By creating a unique concert where the ‘phantom-of-the-operaesque gothic pomposity’ of the organ meets new melodies, Dee invites the audience to rethink the organ as a magic instrument. By converting the organ from an instrument that invites the audience to praise ‘good behaviour’ into a synthetic and totally mechanical instrument where each key she plays sounds like an explosion, Dee embraces the magic embodied in the space at Nikolaj Kunsthal after it has been converted from a former church into an art space.

24 June from 18.00
Copenhagen Contemporary

DJ and food trucks

24 June at 19.00 to 20.45
Refshalevej 96, 1432 København K

Tosh Basco & Wu Tsang, Moved by the Motion

Moved by the Motion is a performance rooted in the eight-year collaboration between Tosh Basco and Wu Tsang. The two artists stage a performance that works as a poetic call and response between movement, language, and storytelling. Situated within Basco and Tsang’s respective practices of improvised dance and vocal performance, their ongoing conversation takes the form of a surrealist ‘exquisite corpse’, as each articulation (and disarticulation) responds to and elaborates on the other. For Art in a Day, this site-specific performance brings their concentration to themes of solitude and connectedness, inviting the audience into a space of intimacy where movement of form completes what remains impenetrable in language.

Only available with pre-ordered tickets:

Book a ticket to the performance at 19-19.45 here.

Book a ticket to the performance at 20-20.45 here.

24 June from 19.30 to 20.15
With a boat sailing from O – Overgaden to Copenhagen Contemporary

Henrik Vibskov, Parade

Vibskov creates a parade where music, art and fashion meet the citizens at once. The parade, composed by performers singing and dressed up with tailored costumes by Vibskov, becomes a ‘healing walk’, where the past is echoed into the present and experienced as a future prophecy. By creating costumes defined by a graphic silhouette and a monochromatic palette, Vibskov brings into the streets of Copenhagen a marching group whose dress code recalls that of women in the 19^th century, when they used to carry fish to the harbor of Gl. Strand from North Copenhagen.

The parade echoes these women’s journey and their ancestral connection to the sea, paying homage to these elements and the matriarchal structures they foster. The parade invites the citizens of Copenhagen to tag along, observe or simply enjoy the magic, ghostly presence that the theatrical costumes, along with the melodies create around them. The group of people moves around the city towards the harbor connecting one performance to the next one, emphasizing how distances in the city and the water could feel different when experiences in a different pace.

24 June at 20.30
Copenhagen Contemporary

Speeches by the directors of the six art centres:

Helene Nyborg Bay, Dina Vester Feilberg, Marie Nipper, Michael Thouber, Anne Hagen Kielgast, and Aukje Lepoutre Ravn.

24 June from 21.00 to 23.00
Near Copenhagen Contemporary (Beddingen)

Monster Chetwynd, Tears

Tears is a large-scale installation and performance created by the artist Monster Chetwynd for Art Basel 2021. Chetwynd’s sculptural installation and performance Tears is inspired by Salvador Dalí’s jewel in the form of a crying eye and is a continuation of her artistic practice, which often involves performative works, various media, and the viewers themselves. In the spaces outside CC, Chetwynd will transform Dali’s precious object into a disrupted sculptural space, where so-called Zorbs will roll around. Performers inside these giant transparent balloons will initiate the movements, following the artist’s choreography to create a scene of teardrops dancing. Periodically, dancers in glamorous costumes will perform a scintillating sequence among the Zorbs. The project was conceived to create a moment of celebratory poetic absurdity in front of the entrance of the fair – a humorous but emphatic comment on the historical moment in which we are currently living.

The installation will be accessible from 22.00 to 23.00

24 June from 23.10 to 23.35
Close to Copenhagen Contemporary

Maja Malou Lyse & Esben Weile Kjær, The Big Gang Bang Theory

For Art in a Day, Weile Kjær and Lyse invites you to witness a firework’s identity crisis. The Big Gang Bang Theory is an experimental firework display developed in collaboration with Nian Fireworks. It plays with the audience’s expectations of this codified form of special-occasion entertainment, normally built as an ongoing crescendo moving towards a climax, emotionally staged and controlled. Here, the unfolding of the display has a very different rhythm—asymmetrical and sporadic. It is accompanied by the fireworks’ monologue – sharing their inner conflicts with the audience as they are exploding above them. The crisis has replaced the climax. The fireworks try to break free from their own history as a virile form of violence turned aesthetic used to celebrate stagnant political regimes and wealth, but struggle to renounce their flamboyant essence. Experience The Big Gang Bang Theory at Copenhagen Contemporary.

24 June from 23.49 to 23.59
Copenhagen Contemporary

Peaches

Peaches once again takes the stage during Art in a Day, where she ends the programme with an intense concert at CC.

An iconic feminist musician, producer, director, and performance artist, Peaches has spent nearly two decades pushing boundaries and wielding immeasurable influence over mainstream pop culture from outside of its confines. Carving a bold, sexually progressive path in her own image, she has made history in the realm of both music and visual art.

Peaches has collaborated with everyone from Iggy Pop and Daft Punk to Kim Gordon and Major Lazer, had her music featured in cultural beacons like Lost In Translation, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Broad City among others. Dubbed a ‘genuine heroine’ by the New York Times, Peaches has released five critically acclaimed studio albums blending electronic music, hip-hop, and punk rock while tackling gender politics, sexual identity, ageism, and the patriarchy. Uncut has raved that her work brought together ‘high art, low humour and deluxe filth [in] a hugely seductive combination’, while Rolling Stone called her ‘surreally funny [and] nasty’. An equally prolific visual artist, Peaches has directed over twenty of her own videos, designed one of the most raw and creative stage shows in popular music, and has appeared at modern art’s most prestigious gatherings, from Art Basel, Miami, to the Venice Biennale.

Afterparty with DJ’s at Copenhagen Contemporary.

Special DJ guests: Maja Malou Lyse & Esben Weile Kjær from 00.00 to 01.00